


I Should Go Now, Quietly. (Laying Waste)

by quaffels



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV), Peter Pan - J. M. Barrie
Genre: F/F, aha drenched in my own personal headcanons and leans more towards ouat than barrie's works, but still
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-04
Updated: 2014-05-04
Packaged: 2018-01-21 23:42:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1568219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quaffels/pseuds/quaffels
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Four months have passed since Peter took away Wendy's brothers, before she saw them disappear into Neverland sky. She's been camping out in the woods ever since, mute and bitter, coming only to the camp to do the laundry and for her daily meal. But Peter isn't completely leaving her in peace; towards the end of her stay, he comes to visit her. Later that night, so does Tigerlily—but her visit isn't so intentional.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Should Go Now, Quietly. (Laying Waste)

**Author's Note:**

> Oh hi guys! So as far as know and as far as I've read and as far as I've researched, there aren't many (only a handful of) Darling Flower (Wendy and Tigerlily) works for OUAT; this makes sense considering that sadly Tigerlily wasn't really made to be a part of the show. But I ship it anyway. There are hints of DP if you squint you guys. 
> 
> For those of you who like to read with music, my suggested soundtrack is Holocene (w. rain) by Bon Iver & Smother by Daughter (live at KEXP.)
> 
> Hope that you like it!! Please do leave comments/questions/prompts for other DF fics because I would love to do more, especially a multi-chapter!! Thanks so much for reading and I hope you enjoy. :)

Wendy’s skin felt tight and stretched over tired bones. Without Michael clinging to her, his little, naive head buried in her stomach, Wendy felt empty and bare. Without John’s hand—clammy, sweaty, a disgusting showcase of a twelve year old boy—jammed in hers, Wendy felt even emptier. They were her brothers, and in Neverland, the Darling boys had become her very own children, two sons she needed to protect. Peter had ripped Michael from her that day with such a violence as she’d never seen, not in anyone, not even in him, not before then. He’d shoved John to the ground with Michael. Like the crucified Christ on their church, Wendy was held down by the center of her hand, Felix’s heel driving into it with a sort of pained and unpleasant expression. The rest of the boys stayed yards away, hundreds of feet between them and the highest tiers of Neverland’s court on the stone-clad beach. Wendy was screaming. Felix was giving Peter a look as though to say “We can’t do this to them.” Peter looked like he’d just smelled something horrid and couldn’t keep his eyes on the eldest Darling, on Wendy, on the one writhing and wailing, pinned down like Christ and weeping like Mary.

That’s when the Shadow came and took them both away.

The infatuation Wendy had developed for Peter began to erode away like canyons, leaving her hollow and cold. A sort of winter, a chillier season, came to Neverland, even though they’d never had seasons before. She’d shiver and would get into scratching fits, turning skin on her legs and arms pink and raw and sometimes bloody. She was still free to roam about—now that she was mute, freer than ever—but she instead found a spot on the woods and only came to the campsite for food once a day or to collect the boy’s laundry and clothes once every fortnight. She slept and washed and spent all her days and all her tears by the creek that all the other boys got their water from. Peter stayed out of her way. Everyone did.

She let her feet dangle in the water almost all day every day, whispering to John and Michael stories that they would never hear and that eventually she would forget. She was left alone. Completely alone. Peter came to visit her sometimes, but she wouldn’t say anything; Wendy would curl into a ball and maybe, if he was lucky, whisper a small, measly, and meek “Leave me alone, Peter, please. Please, Peter.” Peter loved to hear her pleases. They were his favorite thing she ever said. It had never been told to her, but it was something she had found out over the years, and found it truer than ever there in the woods where she could be all alone without anyone watching or listening but the spirits of John and Michael who, she assumed, were most assuredly dead somewhere near Skull Rock, their bodies rotting and purple.

So Peter gave her four months of mourning her brothers in that wilderness, in those patches of clover.

All good things in Neverland, however, had to come to an end, somehow. Nothing good ever lasted.

Wendy had learned that during her time in the woods, too.

One day, Peter had refused to leave her alone. He’d sat down beside her. She’d scooted over a few feet. And he gave this laugh, the only pure laugh he ever gave to her. Wendy had wondered if she was meant to accept it like a Christmas gift she didn’t want, that one present that she had asked for long ago but didn’t want anymore. Once, she would have killed for even a second of Peter’s closeness. He moved so that their knees touched and she let him because she didn’t know what else he could take away from her but there was undoubtedly something he had in that terrible, atrocious, adolescent mind of his. She swallowed and he looked up, at the blinding light seeping through the canopy of trees.

He dared it. He dared everything by looking at it, everyone.

“Have you run into Tigerlily lately?”

Wendy looked at him. His head turned back down and looked back. I dare you, she could hear him say, despite the fact that his lips were closed in that horrifying smirk. She let her eyes trace his jaw before shaking her head. Peter nodded. “Good,” he murmured, smirk gone. It was like he had given up the show, like now that he knew she’d been all alone there was no need to pretend like he liked her. He could see the change and the hollowness and the emptiness and the loneliness within the half-moons under her eyes, see it just as much as she could feel it.

“I have some matters,” he muttered, knowing she didn’t want an excuse. Wendy nodded.

He got up, some mud and dirt sticking to the back of his legs. He didn’t care. Wendy still did, after all of it. She wanted to wash it off, offer to take them for him, maybe offer him another pair hanging from tree branches around them. She opened her mouth, lips parting, tongue giving a small noise, eyes blinking. Immediately, his head snapped back to her. She swallowed again.

He gave her a look she read as  _that’s what I thought._

 

He left, and two days later, she saw Tigerlily for the first time since her original visit to Never Neverland.

She had scared Wendy half to death, running through the woods like that at night.

The princesses’ footsteps, rapid and always gaining speed, started out as a distant rustle against the crickets and the birds and the frogs that still continued to perform under the blanket of stars not visible from the density of trees. The forest was always loud, but it was so awake at night that even now, even after years, Wendy hadn’t ever gotten used to the sound of it. She was too used to quiet cities and the occasional drunken passerby who sounded nothing at all like this. But there was a new sound, Tigerlily’s sound, the sound of feet and adrenaline. If Wendy had listened harder, the sound of a heart.

Tigerlily tripped over Wendy in the dark and fell, her knee getting scraped and curses flying out of her mouth like she had been a part of the pirates and not the tribe. Wendy thought, as Tigerlily spat onto the ground to the cackle of heat thunder that the dark-haired girl was so much more adventurous and explored than her. She probably had seen the deck of Hook’s ship and what his stump of a hand looked like. Wendy had never been so lucky, although she dreamt about it often.

Tigerlily’s brown eyes, ones that were the same color as Wendy’s in the dark, looked at her with a sort of crazed and exhausted curiosity. Rain began to fall and the distant light of Lost Boys’ torches went out, followed by a chorus of groans. Tigerlily’s face was only two inches or so away from Wendy’s, and they stayed like that until they could no longer hear the boys or their upset tones or their torches or their footsteps or their disappointment. Wendy felt a sort of heat radiating from her cheeks, one that she was sure her fingers could reach out and touch. She hoped Tigerlily couldn’t see how pink and rosy and embarrassed her cheeks had become in the dark of Neverland’s night. Water speckled them and Wendy’s nightgown got soaked. It was no more than an hour, no more than ten minutes, really; but it felt like a lifetime to Wendy.

When Tigerlily opened her mouth, Wendy prepared herself for the worst. Instead, no sound was made. Wendy tucked a brown, wet strand of hair behind her ear and Tigerlily laughed. “Thanks, your majesty,” Lily chuckled, running a hand through drenched hair, blacker than ever, blacker even then the horizon of Wendy’s vision, the line of it that meant endless forest. Wendy nodded.

“Not talking? No reprimand for me today, majesty?”

Silence. Wendy Darling talked for nobody anymore, not for Peter, and not even for friends.

The rain slowed to a halt and Tigerlily’s smile faded away, rubbing at the caramel-colored skin on her upper arms. Tigerlily furrowed her thick brows, wondering if this was common Western behavior she hadn’t noticed before. Wendy wanted to apologize and opened her mouth but closed it again. “No?” Tigerlily asked her. Wendy chose not to answer and regretted it. “Fine, Majesty,” she heard Tigerlily mutter before she turned around, back to her. She began to walk away, no longer needing to run, no longer needing to flee adolescent boys with swords and arrows and self-proclaimed skill. Wendy heard something howl in the distance and the dark began to wrap up around the other girl, the one standing, the one who was bored with her.

Wendy sat up on her elbows, and then made it up to a kneel. She let out a shouted whisper.  “Tigerlily!”

The princess didn’t hear.

“LILY!!”

It was a little bit louder and it was enough to make the other one  stop: the taller one, the prettier one, as Wendy thought then, as she’d realized years ago, when she’d first been at Neverland and seen the way Peter and Tigerlily danced around each other like they knew each other so well that they had both become incredibly predictable. Wendy remembered how dangerous Lily could be and how Felix had told her that crossing her was how he’d gotten that nasty scar he laughed about now.

Tigerlily smiled and something twisted and turned within Wendy, butterflies that didn’t feel at all like butterflies  filling her stomach. Wendy realized they felt nothing like butterflies, like dainty things, like pretty things. They felt like a knife. They felt like Felix’s heels had when they pushed down her palms into the rock. They felt almost worse.

What was she supposed to do now? Ask Lily to come to tea with her?

Tigerlily knelt down in front of Wendy and Wendy gnawed on the inner part of her lip.

The smile on Tigerlily’s face grew kind and the two longest fingers on Tigerlily’s left hand reached out to touch the hair that fell in front of Wendy’s eyes, no longer waves and curls but dripping straight lines of brown. Tigerlily’s nose scrunched up and she sighed. “What happened to you, bird?”

Wendy began to cry then. She had cried often, little bits, little tears, but nothing like this. Nothing like the sea of saltwater that she wiped away with her forearms, sniffling. Tigerlily cooed her and for the first time it was not Wendy comforting but Wendy being comforted and Tigerlily held her, and something within Wendy let out a sigh of relief as though there was any way of somehow finding relief on this terrible island, on this place where no one left without Peter’s saying so, where boys died and were forgotten by others but haunted her like scars that she’d put on her skin herself, like they were her fault, like oh God, oh God, Michael and John, rotting, rotting rotting rotting, Michael and John dead, somewhere dead without her, they’d left her, she was crying more and Tigerlily’s hand on her hair, smoothing it down, calming her down. Wendy sniffled Tigerlily’s shoulder and wondered if they were friends now, if this meant that there was even the possibility of a friendship between night and day, if the sun—hadn’t the sun been friends with the moon once? Hadn’t they? Couldn’t they have been if they had worked at it harder than they did?—and the tears dried, and Wendy said a small tired “thank you.”

“Sure, majesty.”

They pulled apart and there were those two inches again, a wall between them.

  
  


Understand that there were so many plans for first kisses. The most popular plan had been with Peter once he’d learned to love her and be kind to her. Once he learned that girls weren’t objects but just as valuable as his Lost Boys, and even more so. Once he learned that she cared and from that, once he learned to care for her, she had imagined a million different kisses, each so much different than Wendy’s first kiss. The first kisses of her imagination were pristine and delicate, flowers that stood in vases alone, in her kitchen, by the sink, or maybe on windowsills that weren’t big enough or were too high up for her to crawl onto. The first kisses of her imagination were with boys and meant love in so many ways that she couldn’t count them on all her toes and all her fingers, even when put together.

Wendy’s first kiss happened then.

It was unclear who had done it first; it might have been Tigerlily, who had leaned in farther than Wendy had. But it also could have been Wendy, because Wendy kissed Tigerlily with shut eyes and open mouth. It was messy, messier than she’d expected, and as she gradually laid back on the forest floor she could feel the mud wet her nightgown. It was nothing like she had planned. The unfamiliar and inner pull between her thighs tugged at her and she whimpered against the other girl’s lips, cheeks hotter than even before and eyes still puffy, even when shut, and Wendy didn’t know what Tigerlily was doing except that she felt warm against the cold of everywhere else, that gooseflesh was crawling over her, covering her up in a blanket. Lily kissed her neck and a trembling sigh rushed out of her lips, red and sore from where she bit down on them with her teeth so hard she was surprised they weren’t bleeding.

Tigerlily was kissing her faster and faster and Wendy gasped, dainty, pale, bony hands finding smooth, curved, tanned shoulders. She let out another whimper from the back of her throat and whispered  _Lily_ while the other kissed Wendy’s stomach, an owl hooting in the distance. Wendy’s limbs felt heavy and she breathed out and out and out while Lily came back to kiss her lips again and again and again, kiss the sigh off of them.

Wendy’s lip shuddered as Tigerlily carefully and slowly licked the inside of her mouth, tongue brushing against tongue. Her hands shook against the Lily’s chest and she gave another gasp, eyes shut tight.

All good things in Neverland, mind you, come to an end.

Wendy’s eyes fluttered open and she slid on her back through the mud, sliding away from Tigerlily and again, Tigerlily gave that confused look, eyebrows furrowed, now swollen lips pursed. “We can’t,” Wendy said, like what they had just done was impossible and something they hadn’t really done because they couldn’t. Tigerlily clenched her jaw and dragged her nails across her thighs, kneeling again.

Tigerlily got up and when she heard her name this time did not reply.

Two weeks later, when the princess came to find that bird again, the bird had flown away and gone back to Peter’s camp.


End file.
